Don’t take my word for this. Take the word instead of the former Conservative MP Matthew Parris:

She is mean. She is rude. She is cruel. She is stupid. I have heard that from almost everyone who has dealt with her.

Of course, that implies that might be a 2×2 here. What might the opposite of ‘stubborn’ be? And ‘stupid’? Well, let’s draw it.

If Theresa May is in the bottom left box, who might be in the others? A friend who used to work in Whitehall suggested that we could track our last four Prime Ministers this way. Blair is Smart and Flexible; Brown, Smart and Stubborn; Cameron, Stupid and Flexible.

All of these might be horses for courses. Smart and Flexible might create new political openings, but it also leads to the Third Way and the Iraq War. You can see how Smart and Stubborn might lead to the brooding suspicion that often characterised Gordon Brown’s political style, but it was effective in reducing child poverty levels and was also, probably, the reason why Britain’s banks  remained solvent and open during the financial crisis. (Osborne might be in the same space, which led to his over-commitment to austerity in the face of the evidence, and endless Cunning Plans that were apparently going to destroy the Labour Party for a generation).

In terms of the Brexit catastrophe, we would have been better off had Cameron been Stubborn and Stupid and May Stupid and Flexible. Cameron would then have been less cavalier about a referendum, and May would have had more than a single Plan A that she is clearly over-identified with and over-committed to, in the face of overwhelming Commons defeats that a Flexible politician would have learned from. By “catastrophe,” to be clear, I mean the huge costs of all of the consequences of proceeding with the referendum, from the re-normalisation of racism, to the damaging effects on present and future household prosperity, to the collapse of British influence and soft power as a result of becoming an international laughing stock.

In case people think I’m making a political point about intelligence, Churchill was also Smart and Stubborn, which was a useless set of characteristics during the 1930s, when he was on the backbenches obsessed with the India question, but valuable during the 1940s as a war leader. Macmillan was probably Smart and Flexible, which meant that he was able to persuade the Conservative Party that de-colonising winds were blowing through Africa.

And Jeremy Corbyn is probably Stupid and Flexible, perhaps because he delegates the things he’s not interested in to his colleagues.

Of course, a 2×2 is a model, and “All models are wrong. Some are useful.” There are some politicians that don’t fit in as tidily; John Major’s pragmatic party management, perhaps. And of course, Donald Trump is all over the map.

Images courtesy of Wikipedia.

The game of chess has a wonderful word in it: zugzwang. It is a German word, which describes the situation in which one has “a disagreeable obligation to move.” Any move, in other words, worsens the position.

For some reason this came to mind while following the Brexit moves over the course of the last week, and then again when I’d heard that Theresa May and David Davis had had to go to Brussels for pre-dawn meetings to fit in with the busy schedules of Jean-Claude Juncker and Donald Tusk.

Here are some quick notes on all of this. Some of these are obvious to anyone who has been paying attention (which broadly excludes most of the Conservative party).

1. The EU is good at negotiating…

You can’t out-negotiate the EU. One of the reasons for this is that—given it’s a 28 country institution going on 27—negotiation is the only thing it does most of the time. So, on each of the substantive issues so far, the UK has blustered and the EU has won. It’s a bit like watching a club level chess player going into a game with an International Master or Grand Master and suddenly discovering after the routine of the opening moves that they are in a hopeless position. And this has, so far, been the easy part of the game.

2. … because it looks after its own

One of the reasons the EU hangs together is that it listens to its members and represents their interests when they conflict with others. In the current EU world, Ireland always trumps the UK. The EU wasn’t going to do anything that created the possibility of a hard border between the North and South. (Incidentally, I read pieces a few weeks ago that said that Ireland’s hardball position on the border was somehow undermined by the balance of public opinion in the North. Wrong: the audience for Ireland’s position was the other EU leaders and the EU negotiating team. In fact, the Conservatives keep making the mistake of thinking that public opinion matters.)

3. Ireland’s position was entirely predictable

I’m not going to spend time on this, since it is entirely obvious, but it ought to have passed the attention of Downing Street and the rest of them that the Irish Constitution contains an aspiration towards a united Ireland that used to be completely hard line and was toned down a bit as a concession as part of the Good Friday Agreement. The change had to be agreed by referendum. And that Ireland’s main political parties were formed around their positions towards the civil war that followed Ireland’s independence. The most trivial analysis of actor interests tells you that no Irish politician could agree to a hard border with the north, and remain in politics.

4. All of May’s options were bad

What this means is that May’s position was zugswang, caught between Ireland, the government’s DUP “partners,” and the hard Brexiteers in the Cabinet and the press. Of course, she’d made all of this worse for herself with unhelpful talk of “red lines” earlier on, and the timing of the moving of Article 50, both designed with party in mind, rather than UK interests. Ian Dunt walked through May’s options this in excellent detail, but in summary, they were:

1. Keep going with the Hard Brexit model, with the re-formation of the hard border between the north and south of Ireland, and have the EU decline to move on to the trade talks;
2. Try to square the EU by moving the customs border into the sea, and have the DUP bring down the government;
3. Move away from the Hard Brexit position, but in such a way that the barking Eurosceptics didn’t have enough rope to hang her.

4. The politics of indecision

For May the third option is the least worst of these three bad options, and it’s also in the interests of the EU as well, so it has played ball by praising her political skills to give her some cover and inventing a phrase—”regulatory alignment“—that lets her be vague for a bit longer. It is the least worst for several reasons. One of the reasons is that it leaves everything open for the time being; for all the talk about politics being about making decisions, often, especially when it comes to internal party politics, the best thing to do is not to force a decision. Of course, everyone else knows this as well, which is why the hard right are already on manoeuvres.

5. The weakening Brexit position

Among the other reasons why it is the least worst option is that it is the only option on which May might get support from Labour and the SNP if the hard wing of the Conservative party tried to force the matter. (Of course, this is not a great position for a party leader to be in, especially since the Opposition parties might leave her to swing if they thought the alternative was collapsing the government). It is also becoming clearer that the consequences of a Brexit without reasonable levels of migration are not good for the economy, the health service, fruit picking, the state of Britain’s university research, soft power, etc etc, however much experts gets derided for pointing these things out. (Of course, the reason for the timing of Friday morning’s meeting was because Junker had to fly to Japan to sign a vast trade deal).

Third, the “no-deal” option is clearly a fantasy, as was pointed out recently by a Parliamentary committee. Fourth, the pro-Brexit ministers are looking more shambolic by the moment: David Davis has had a terrible week, Liam Fox looks more and more like he’s signifying nothing, Boris is now completely visibly incompetent, even to the Conservative press. In other words, there’s still a chance that by the time she has to deal with them, they will be completely discredited, at least outside of the Express and the Murdoch newspapers.

6. Dying off

Of course, the longer it goes on, the notional Brexit “majority” dies off (I mean this absolutely literally), and the large costs of getting to a deal that’s clearly worse than continuing membership of the EU become more visible. At the moment I can’t see the event that allows politicians to break with the “will of the people” schtick about the referendum, and start saying this, but maybe that doesn’t matter. One of the things that I have learnt from futures work is that trends have a habit of configuring events in unexpected ways. The collapse of UKIP and its vote also means that Labour MPs are less worried about those of their supporters and voters who also voted Brexit. This was probably over-stated as a problem, looking at the numbers, either because politicians are prone to unthought-through hysteria about such things or because the PLP was using it as a stick to beat Corbyn. Maybe we have to leave and then rejoin again once the Imperial fantasists have isolated themselves.

7. British exceptionalism

One of the elements of this that was mentioned to me by Ian Christie is the extent to which the Brexiteers suffer from a misplaced sense of British exceptionalism. This is doubtless a legacy of Empire (see the discussion of Churchill, below), but from the outside it looks only like a misplaced sense of cultural superiority. Top Brexiteer Iain Duncan Smith might be an exemplar of this: this is the man who told Channel 4 News that Ireland was playing hardball on the  border issue because there was a Presidential election coming up. (Wrong at level of fact and interpretation.)

This evident sense of effortless superiority may be one of the reasons why the British have so far neglected to prepare for any of the negotiations in any meaningful way. Or, come to that, have wasted so much time and political capital on what amounted to the opening moves. Brendan Behan’s satirical song ‘The Captain and the Kings‘ strikes a chord here.

By the moon that shines above us in the misty morning night
Let us cease to run ourselves down and praise God that we are white
And better still are English, tea and toast and muffin rings

One of the curiosities to me of all of this is that having spent a lifetime watching the left suffer from magical thinking, which is always a sign of weakness, is that magical thinking is now the redoubt of the hard right. Michael Clifford caught this well in the Irish Examiner: “These people are obviously highly reluctant to address the real world lest it interferes with their delusion of grandeur.” As Ian Christie noted, one of the results is that the UK is suffering from an advanced version of the “sophisticated state failure,” diagnosed in the research of Carnegie Europe.

(J D Wetherspoon alienates younger customers with his views on Brexit. Image: Wetherspoon)

8. The coming Conservative split

The endgame for this as far as the Conservatives are concerned still looks like a split party. This still comes as a surprise to those of us brought up to think of the Conservatives as ruthless political operators when it came to winning and maintaining power. I haven’t checked the numbers, but there are probably at least 60, and perhaps up to 100, who would willingly leave in protest against a soft Brexit. They are probably perfectly aligned with the views of the Conservatives’ ageing party membership, but not with anyone else.

This has a logic of its own: the whole Brexit/EU question is a fight that’s been going on in the Conservative party ever since Churchill failed to square off the EEC in the early ’50s with his 19th century view of Britain as an Imperial power. (I also mean this literally: Churchill’s political views were formed while Victoria was still on the throne.) Brexit represents the culmination of that 65 year old feud: no more fudging is possible, there’s no more road to kick the can down. As for the rest, they are probably versions of centre-right Christian Democrats who could probably re-align themselves with the Conservatives’ traditional business base, currently broadly unrepresented in the UK political system. This would all be ugly, it will go on for some time, and—to end on another useful German word—will offer endless opportunities for schadenfreude.

Morning! If you've just picked up your phone, here's a quick visual guide to how @theresa_may's #GE2017 night went pic.twitter.com/MtFD87EUs6

— Guardian politics (@GdnPolitics) June 9, 2017

Obviously the dust is still swirling around the election, since it has thrown up more questions than answers. And we’re still waiting for some of the actual election data about turnout and so on. But there are some initial conclusions that can be drawn. This is the first of two posts, since I tried to write it as one post and it got far too long.

1. Neoliberalism is over

The economic programmes in the manifestoes of both Conservatives and Labour were, effectively, anti-neoliberal programmes.  (By neoliberalism I mean, following Will Davies, a form of politics in which state actors follow a “modernising” agenda that broadens the scope of markets, using the rhetoric of “competition” to target institutions that lie outside of the market, and to marketise or abolish them.)

I think that Tim Jackson was the first to point this out, more than a week before the election, noting the all but “ubiquitous call across the multi-coloured manifestos of the 2017 election to start building “an economy that works” – for everyone.”

Anthony Barnett made a similar point in Open Democracy a week ahead of the election:

They share a common rupture from the dominant neoliberal approach of the last 35 years, with its anti-state philosophy of market competition. In the night of media silence the old form of economic government is slipping below the waters, as the public distances itself from an epoch of military failure and financial crash. This extraordinary and far-reaching development has not been discussed on the BBC or in most of the media as they cannot use the term ‘neoliberalism’.

Or, as Aditya Chakrabortty observed in The Guardian of the Conservative manifesto,

Just five paragraphs in, and she’s using language that would have made Gordon Brown stutter. This is the same Tory prime minister who wants a cap on energy prices, talks about “a new centre ground”, and investigates the Victorian practices of the gig economy’s overlords.

Chakrabortty described it as Britain’s “first post-crash election”:

This election is the first in which both party leaders drop the happy-clappy, catch up with just how bad things have got – and, at last, grope around for fixes. … It takes decades for an ideology to die – but among the power elites of London, you can finally see it happening.

It’s impossible to overstate what a big shift this is. The point is that it’s in the electoral interests of both the main parties to tell this story. The Conservative “Red Tory” Philip Blond has an agenda here, but this is his conclusion from the election:

“An astonishing number of people voted for state socialism,” said Blond, claiming that the fiscal tightness of the previous chancellor, George Osborne, would lose. “If the party were to go to the country with a conventional Tory offer it would lose and lose badly.”

“Thanks to Jeremy Corbyn Red Toryism is needed now more than ever, because it is the only thing that the party has in the box to match it.”

2. Age and location are the new political markers

One of the things we learnt from the Brexit vote was that progressive opinion was correlated by age and education (although these clearly overlap) and also by location; core cities were likely to be Remain, towns, countryside and declining cities Leave. This chart, from YouGov, shows how sharp the political polarisation by age had become, especially when you look at the flat distribution of LibDem votes by age. This was ignored by many politicians, and analysts, because of the conventional wisdom that young people couldn’t be bothered to vote (the main reason, as far as one can tell, that so many polls got the result so wrong.)

The chart below, from the FT, shows how these age divisions have sharpened since the financial crisis. People of working age are a lot more likely to vote Labour, which isn’t that surprising when you taken into account that the wages of those in work are still below their level they were at in 2008.

The geography of this is pretty clear as well. This map gives an indication of which parts of the country swung towards the Conservatives, and which to Labour.

There’s already been some nonsense written about this, for example in the pages of the The Economist, which proclaimed after the election with little visible evidence of actual thought that ‘the culture wars arrive in Britain‘.

But the reason they think that is that they have an outmoded view of class, which isn’t up to the task of analysing the changes we’re seeing.

New versions of class

I argued in my recent paper in the Journal of Futures Studies on ‘the new politics of place’ that we’re seeing these changes is because labour markets have changed with the rise of “post industrial” economies. This has produced new versions of class, in which–if you’re not paying attention–you can be confused by aspects of identity politics.

It is quite a complex argument, and obviously you should go and read the whole thing, but in brief, in economies dominated by businesses producing knowledge or services, the labour process is different.

Scott Lash and John Urry explained the difference in Economies of Signs and Space in 1994. Labour costs in knowledge and services industries, they write, especially services, represents a high proportion of the total. Labour is “implicated” (their phrase) in the services delivery, which is “the intended outcome of a necessarily social process” (p.200). Further, “the social composition of the producers… is often part of what is ‘sold’ to customers” (p. 200), and in turn this means that emotional labour, the ability to perform emotional work, becomes an integral part of the product or service. Or, in the words of Hardt and Negri, “Society has become a factory.”

Citizens of somewhere

What this means, for all that Theresa May noise about “citizens of somewhere” and “citizens of nowhere” these workers are clearly citizens of somewhere; manufacturing can move fairly easily, but service and knowledge businesses are firmly located in particular places. In other words, age and place are markers, but they are markers of a new type of class composition that has finally started to emerge from the end of the manufacturing era.

Equally, when you look at the six seats that Labour lost to the Conservatives, many of which have been Labour for years, you can see that they’re in the old manufacturing areas and haven’t managed to rebuild their economies around services or knowledge. Here’s the full list: Copeland, Mansfield, Middlesbrough South, North-East Derbyshire, Stoke South, Walsall North.

There’s a further sign of this division. As theFT pointed out, seats with a higher proportion of people in poor health were more likely to be Conservative, though this is not really just about health. It’s a marker for places with weak local economies that have not managed to build a services economy. Conversely, Labour did better among seats with a higher proportion of people with degrees, which is a marker for how well the local economy has adapted to a knowledge-led services economy.

3. Pundits don’t understand mobilisation

Pundits treat politics as a zero sum game. That’s what the swingometer is about. It works OK as a rule of thumb when turnout figures are broadly the same and politics is played out between two parties. But they are completely blind to mobilisation. And although we won’t know how many of the young voted this time around (there’s a 72% figure being quoted but it’s not an official figure), it’s reasonable to assume that some of the increase in turnover, seen across England, came from a greater youth vote. This also related to the media channels that were telling the election story, as I’ll discuss in the second of these posts.

But this isn’t the first time they’ve made this mistake. The vast SNP surge in Scotland in 2015 came because they had similarly mobilised a whole group of poorer voters taken for granted by Scottish Labour, first during the IndyRef, and then during the election campaign. It’s possible that part of their decline this time may have been because they didn’t tell enough of an economic and social story. But again: pundits are short-sighted, and don’t look at the long trends. The SNP is still heading in an upwards direction when you take a longer view.

4. Politics has reasserted itself

The political result of the Brexit vote was that politics was effectively suspended in favour of some mystical rhetoric about the will of the people, backed up by the attack dogs of the right-wing press. This is one of the reasons why the various Brexit votes in Parliament went through broadly uncontested.

The fine Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole tells this recent history this way on the New York Review of Books blog:

The popular will had been established on that sacred referendum day. And it must not be defied or questioned. Hence, Theresa May’s allies in The Daily Mail using the language of the French revolutionary terror, characterizing recalcitrant judges and parliamentarians as “enemies of the people” and “saboteurs.”

This is why May called an election. Her decision to do so—when she had a working majority in parliament—has been seen by some as pure vanity. But it was the inevitable result of the volkish rhetoric she had adopted. A working majority was not enough—the unified people must have a unified parliament and a single, uncontested leader.

Well, we know how that turned out. What’s interesting about this, though, is that in calling an election to get a mandate for Brexit negotiations, May herself broke this spell. The good news: I’m willing to bet that we won’t be hearing anything about the “will of the people” anymore, even from the Daily Mail.

A couple of asides

Aside #1 (Labour)

Given where they were coming from, Labour has done as well as it could have hoped in this election. As Anthony Barnett said, this was partly because Corbyn “captured the anti-system, anti-elitist spirit of Brexit… He is the energetic insurgent seeking change and she is the evasive, manipulative representative of the status quo.” And while the pundit class and some of Labour’s hard right said that a different Labour  leader would have won the election, I can’t see who that leader would have been, for these reasons: there aren’t other obvious leaders who would have enthused the young, and other leaders would have watered down the manifesto. Better to have UKIP voters coming back to the party because of economic policy rather than trying to make migration pledges the Conservatives will always be able to outbid you on, and which alienate the younger, urban voter.

Aside #2 (Journalists)

I used to think the BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg was biased, but one result of watching her performance on Friday made me realise that she may just be a bit dim. So John Curtice, a fine pollster but not a political analyst, said on Friday morning that Corbyn had done only as well as Gordon Brown in 2010, which is broadly true in terms of seats. She repeated this observation without qualification several times during the day. But it is self-evidently not true in terms of votes (40% to 29%).

Nor is it true in terms of the long arcs of elections, where parties tend to rise and fall over a series of elections: GE2010 saw a fall in the Labour vote in percentage terms and in actual numbers of voters, for the third successive election. GE2017 saw an increase in percentage share and absolute numbers for the second successive election. Perhaps my expectations of journalists are too high, but I’d expect a national political editor to be telling this sort of nuanced story about an election.

Part 2 will follow as soon as I can write it.

The triggering of Article 50 marks the end of the political stand-off that has been the dominant feature of British politics since the Brexit referendum last June: a stand-off between our elected representatives on the one hand and “the will of the people,” as expressed in the referendum vote, on the other. Between the end of June and the end of March, any party with something to lose has had to go along with a show of respecting the referendum result, whatever they thought of it. Scotland too, although this has a different tint there. (The obvious exception is Tim Farron’s Liberal Democrats, but in 2016-17 they have nothing left to lose.)

So politics can start up again now, with differences on the terms of Brexit, and we saw this as early as last Sunday, when Labour’s Keir Starmer popped up on the Andrew Marr show to make a robust defence of “soft Brexit”, and on Wednesday when by all accounts Andrew Neil gave May the toughest interview of her Prime Ministerial career.

It’s also the last point at which May has any control of her Premiership, and there must be a question about how many of her senior civil servants have pointed this out to her and her ministers over the last few months.

Negotiating

This is because the Brexit negotiations will stretch British governance capacity to its limits. If you doubt the balance of the negotiating expertise, it’s worth reading the two Brexit documents produced by the EU and Britain. One of them is a coherent, thought-through, credible and fairly tough negotiating position, with clear red lines. The other one looks as if it was cobbled together by advisers in Number 10 at the last possible moment, despite having had months to think about what they have to say. There’s something of the same whiff about the Great Repeal Bill white paper: there’s less to it than meets the eye. (On the capacity issues for the British government, Buzzfeed had a useful list.)

Perhaps this is also the reason why ministers have started to row back from all that hard Brexit posturing: even David Davis has had to concede that the immigration numbers might not change much, because (who knew?) there are some sectors of the economy that would collapse without them. Indeed Matthew d’Ancona suggests that the trio of Brexit ministers are now more emollient on this point, for economic reasons, than the Prime Minister.

According to a senior government source, a wonderful irony is now manifesting itself around the cabinet table in the contributions of Liam Fox, David Davis and Boris Johnson: “There’s no doubt that Theresa wants to bring down immigration. But the three main Brexiteers are suddenly becoming more and more vocal about the need to keep the numbers sufficiently high for the needs of the economy. You hear Liam saying: ‘We mustn’t do anything that threatens prosperity.’ It’s becoming more and more clear to them what’s at stake.”

Black elephants

At the same time, the FT points out (in its essential daily Brexit briefing) that now Article 50 has been triggered the newspapers–not just the usual suspects–have moved on to the ballooning crisis in the UK public sector. If ever there was a “Black elephant,” or predictable surprise, it is this: that George Osborne’s monomaniacal obsession with debt reduction and therefore austerity would create and then leave behind a huge problem for his successor to sort out, or get dragged under by it, and this would have been true regardless of the referendum outcome. This particular elephant seems to be turning into a herd.

Today the FT and [Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/mar/31/nhs-surgery-target-operations-cancelled-simon-stevens) report that the National Health Service has axed the 18-week target for operations. This is one of the NHS’s most important waiting time targets but scrapping it is essential if the service is to survive continued austerity. Meanwhile, [The Times reports](http://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/forces-face-shortfall-of-10bn-after-costs-soar-wqxts8hn2) that the armed forces face a £10bn shortfall amid escalating costs for new ships and aircraft. Service chiefs are scrambling to make savings elsewhere. The Daily Mail reports that cash-strapped local councils are fording middle class pensioners to pay higher care home fees in order to subsidise others with no savings. The Sun focuses on how Britain’s police forces are now able to solve just one-in-ten burglaries.

Maybe just worth spelling this out a little further: some of these papers are strong supporters of the Government and of Brexit, and some of these issues are ones that older and more conservative voters care about.

Economy

In the meantime, the proportion of British people who think that Brexit will be bad for the British economy has increased steadily since the referendum, as Simon Wren-Lewis points out, while the views on the vote are pretty stable.

Wren-Lewis’ explanation for this is, broadly, about the British sense of fair play: we’ve had the vote, and now we need to get on with it. I think there’s a different explanation. People gauge social facts and social hypotheses differently, which is one of the reasons that it’s often hard to get people to act on futures’ insights. The vote is a social fact, and the prospects for the economy are still a hypothesis. (BritainThinks’ Brexit research project also finds that, so far, “what unites ‘leavers’ is that the economic arguments, sacrosanct to so many politicians simply don’t matter.”

The BritainThinks research finds four groups of voters on Brexit, not just Leavers and Remainers. Leavers split into ‘die-hard’ enthusiasts and ‘cautious optimists’, while Remainers are ‘accepting pragmatists’ or ‘devastated pessimists’.

Cognitive dissonance

Significantly, so far, with the exception of the ‘devastated pessimists’, three of these groups remain optimistic about the outcome of Brexit. This includes optimism about the future of our public services:

One typical ‘leaver’ said “I am looking forward to it. This is a fantastic opportunity to rebuild the country: more police, better hospitals, more schools and more teachers”, while even a ‘remainer’ observed “This is a chance to explore a different avenue for Britain.”

It’s an open question as to how long cognitive dissonance will survive pessimistic news on the economy or continuing crises in the public sector, but it seems possible that at least two of these groups might change their views. And the demographics of the Brexit vote haven’t gone away.

Old age

As Anthony Barnett reminded us, Brexit is a project for the elderly English:

Within the generations, the differences remain as striking as they were in the vote itself: there is no majority for leaving the EU amongst those under 55. Those between 55 and 64 favour Brexit by a mere 52%. It is the over 65’s who swing the outcome as they break 59% for Leave…. Brexit is government of the old, by the old, for the old – and it will perish with the old.

In fact the profile of Brexit voters looks a lot like the profile of Conservative party supporters and voters, and Brexit is clearly a Conservative party project, whatever the “Lexit” arguments. But time is not on their side, and nor is the likely range of outcomes.

A combination of being outsmarted by EU negotiators, adverse economic news, and a looming public sector crisis, including on issues such as police and Armed Forces funding that are traditionally Conservative issues, could do quite quickly do for the Government’s current reputation for competence.

One view of the whole referendum fiasco was that it was a strategy to try to hold together a party that has been fractured on Europe since the 1950s, and which looks as if it is in long-term demographic decline. You can never predict how politics will turn out. But even given the current state of the Labour party, as it wrestles with the challenge of how to move beyond the crisis of social democracy, the Brexit negotiation process and the stored up problems from the Cameron/Osborne assault on public services seems likely to be a fundamental challenge to the health of the Conservatives.

The image at the top of the post is by Alisdare Hickson, via Flickr, and is published here under a Creative Commons licence.